


Wana // Trap

by deervelvet



Category: Gundam 00
Genre: Addiction, Alcohol, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Depression, F/M, Gen, Not Actually Unrequited Love, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-12 01:54:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15329118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deervelvet/pseuds/deervelvet
Summary: Day 1 of Gundam 00 Week 2018.Prompt: “Wana [Trap]” - First Line VS Last LineThere hadn’t been any warning in the days prior to Leesa Kujo showing up on Billy Katagiri’s front porch. [Timeskip-era character study.]





	Wana // Trap

_//despair is an alluring trap, a door that shuts you in - my heart is a battlefield, so I can’t tell anyone//_

 

* * *

 

There hadn’t been any warning in the days prior to Leesa Kujo showing up on Billy Katagiri’s front porch. No twinkling of falling stars, no haggard old fortune-teller women from mysterious lands who read tea leaves, no omens, no prophets. In fact, the recent stretch of radio silence that had come to fill the distance between the two after their relationship had seemed to be on the upswing once more suggested quite the opposite; Leesa was gone.

 

Over the course of the past year or so since they’d reconnected, the frequency of their communications had remained sparse but steady, and the contents of their conversations remained cordial — friendly at best, always with a certain iciness that froze any routes that may have turned toward deeper, heavier subjects. They were merely two former coeds reconnecting in adulthood and enduring the awkwardness that always comes with reconciling two lives having diverged down different paths. Something commonplace not worth a deeper analysis, although both of them might have admitted to harboring certain feelings they struggled to verbalize. But it was safer, more appropriate for them to share half a sidewalk in a crowded, midday public square or a spot at the bar in a noisy sports pub. The barriers that kept them at arm’s length from one another were many, and the timing had never been right.

 

But then Leesa just vanished one day, and Billy’s calls began going to voicemail and his texts - if they were even read - went unanswered. For as long as he’d known her, Leesa had always been flighty. Billy knew she was the kind of woman who kept two steps ahead of her demons by constantly running from them. This behavior was nothing new. Where had she gone now? She may well have left the Earth’s atmosphere this time; demons found it hard to leave the warm bosom of Earth and all its mortal men for the cold, lifeless berth of space. Maybe she’d gone to work on one of the colonies. Maybe she’d gone further. Billy had begun to accept the fragile nature of what they’d cultivated and prepared himself to scrap everything.

 

Nevertheless, on an unassumingly cloudless day when Billy drove around the intersection to the lane where his military-standard housing unit sat surrounded by its cookie cutter duplicates, there she’d been, reclining in the plastic Adirondack chair he swore he’d eventually use (but never did).

 

“Hey, Billy,” was all she’d said once he’d managed to get the vehicle safely into park after narrowly avoiding a mailbox in his shock. The way she’d leaned on the railing, her arms crossed easily at the wrists and elbows bearing the bulk of her weight, her hips pushed back into a deep stretch, the smell of brown liquor subliming off of her skin in the thick heat of a late Midwestern summer like steam from hot, wet pavement — he could tell she’d been drinking.

 

She’d only had with her a small duffel bag — the sort appropriate for a long weekend trip but nothing longer — and a full bottle of Hennessy. “A gift for the host,” she’d explained with a wink and a smile, pulling the bottle out of its brown paper covering just enough to reveal the label. That smile. It had been there on her face for as long as Billy had been near enough to make out her individual features. It had set him on edge from the very start; Leesa had a warm, playful smile that always conveyed just a bit of coyness, as if she was always holding back a joke or a secret. It was a genuine smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes and made her thin cheeks plump up as every muscle in her face seemed to push and pull at once, genuine in its sheer mechanics. This one was not that smile. The one she’d wore that day was the kind of smile Billy had seen doctors use to try and break the news of a terminal illness gently to family members in the waiting room. Leesa had come with bad news. Terminal news, maybe. Something had happened to her, or maybe still was.

 

And still, all Billy had been able to do as he moved from his car towards his front door and the woman blocking it was respond dumbly, “Hey, Kujo.”

 

Her decision to come to the States had been a spur-of-the-moment one, she’d explained, and she’d only purchased a one-way ticket. She hadn’t meant to stay this long, but three weeks later and she’d run out of money for a hotel room, let alone a plane ticket. She’d meant to call him before now, honest, but she’d been dealing with some loose ends. Billy didn’t mind. She’d appeared on a Tuesday. He’d taken the rest of the week off to buy her toiletries and snacks and various other things not contained in her paltry luggage. He’d set up the pull-out sofa in the spare room and apologized for the mothball odor radiating out from the linens. He’d cleared out a drawer for her and taken her to the mall to replenish her wardrobe. He’d shown her around the base (within allowable limits, of course) and around the civilian areas just off-base; they’d joked about how little there was to enjoy just beyond the fringes if cornfields didn’t interest you. He’d taken her to apply for a work visa and a driver’s license. He’d taken care of her, doted on her as much as was appropriate.

 

“Please,” she’d tell him, physically waving him away each and every time he’d offer to drive her into town or help her with some task, “don’t go to all the hassle for me, Katagiri. You’ve done more than enough.” And yet, Billy would persist, taking her to appointments and stores and spotting her cash when she needed it.

 

Perhaps inevitably, perhaps because they merely wished it to be so, their relationship quickly crossed the line between platonic and sexual, although “romantic” was not a checkpoint necessarily crossed along that road. By daylight, they were boyfriend and girlfriend because it was easiest to explain it that way. In the cover of night, Leesa’s appetites were large, and Billy was happy to oblige even if for the companionship factor alone. For him, it was more, but he’d known from the outset that his intentions were one-sided. He could live with that.

 

The novelty of their newfound living arrangements and the flurry of activity surrounding her immigration ushered the first few weeks along at a breakneck speed. With barely enough hours in each day to complete all the tasks they’d been handed, there simply wasn’t time to dwell on the past and its unspoken knowledge. In the stillness of the night, however, or on a day when the news chose to broadcast the particularly dark subjects of death tolls in the Middle East or the atrocious living conditions found in Human Reform League prison camps, cracks would appear in Leesa’s surface, and that sad smile would crawl its way back to her face. “It’s just the way the world is right now,” she’d sometimes say, the gravel of her voice knowing and tempered by undivulged experiences. “It’s depressing.” But that was the extent of what she was willing to reveal, and Billy, not wanting to push her away, didn’t dare pry.

 

Instead, Billy had made the decision to distract her. They found fun things to do around the base - or as much fun as one could possibly have within a certain radius of a military installation. They saw movies and giggled at the trite romance plots over a glass of rosé. They had friends - Billy’s, of course - over for game nights. Leesa kept everyone’s cup filled with libations from the shelf she’d taken upon herself to have installed and stocked in Billy’s kitchen one day when he was at work, but no cup held more refills than her own. He took her out after work for dinner mixers with his coworkers and their spouses, hoping she could meet some friends to keep her company during the day when he was at work. But she was always sloshed well before the first round of drinks were even ordered and once quickly gained a disreputation during a meal with a few higher ranking officers by leaning forward across the table to too-loudly gain the attention of the waitstaff for additional drinks, her low-cut shirt that had been buttoned incorrectly by inebriated fingers nearly failing at its job of maintaining her decency. 

 

Embarrassed but incredibly patient, Billy had run damage control following each situation where Leesa had had just a little too much to drink. “She’s just sleep deprived,” he’d explain. “She’s on a new medication. She’ll stop acting so loopy when she adjusts to the dosage. She’s been having a rough time. She’s under a lot of stress with her immigrations appointments and application status. I’ve talked to her; she’s going to behave.”

 

But Billy wasn’t an idiot, and neither were the officers who had been scandalized by Billy’s girlfriend’s breasts almost falling out into plain view. The reprimand passed Leesa who was beyond the military’s direct reach as a civilian and landed squarely on Billy’s shoulders.

 

Graham had approached Billy unprovoked about the subject of his new live-in girlfriend’s alcohol intake only once. His intentions had been purely out of concern for Billy’s own mental well-being; the woman was nearly a stranger to him and he was only as concerned for her as he would be any other stranger. Their singular one-on-one interaction had involved Leesa vomiting a bright blue mixed drink onto his boots a little after a two o’clock in the afternoon on a weekday, and so Graham couldn’t say he cared much for the girl. It was his friend with whom he was concerned, and there were no attempts at pretending otherwise.

 

“I’m just worried,” Graham had admitted. “I don’t think she’s good for you, Billy. You’re on thin ice with the COs already. Don’t let her knock your life off-course when things are going so well for you.”

 

Coming from Graham, the gravity of the situation snapped into crystal clarity. Disagreement, of course, was futile; Billy wouldn’t have believed a denial if he had put one forward, anyway.

 

From that point on, Billy and Leesa were just friends in all senses of the term. Roommates who liked to spend time together but who ultimately went to bed alone. Stabilizing Leesa’s mental health became their number one priority. Post traumatic stress disorder: Plenty of service members fought that battle, and Leesa joined their ranks after Billy finally insisted she get help, going so far as to drop her off at the psychiatrist’s office himself and refusing to deliver her home until she’d at least made an effort to receive a diagnosis. Just having a name to pin to the thing that followed her like a shadow seemed to be a relief; things with names could be dissected out from one’s original personality, studied, treated, eliminated.

 

Although Billy never felt it appropriate to ask about the root of the problem, he was eager to know. If he knew, then maybe, just maybe he could do something about it. It was in his nature as an engineer to solve problems. Even problems that were deemed insolvable. If it was a person who had hurt her, he could do… something. Get revenge. Kill, if he had to. He designed machines that were built to kill thousands — was the leap between designing a weapon and utilizing one really so far? No options were off the table. He could fix it. He could fix her.

 

But not if she wouldn’t tell him. And she never did.

 

Of course there had been inklings. Billy could estimate based on statistical probability alone what she’d been through. Almost no one had escaped the ongoing wars unscathed. Everyone had lost someone they loved, and some people had lost everything. He’d known that there had been something that had happened just out of grad school. Some incident where, because of bad intel, she’d been ultimately responsible for a significant loss in troops. Leesa had been with the AEU back then, and so he’d never exactly gotten the full picture, but whisperings of that incident had spread like wildfire despite the commanders in Europe trying to sweep it under the rug.

 

If that was it, if that was the thing haunting her, Billy had already forgiven her for that. The nature of humans was to make mistakes. A big mistake, to be sure, a costly mistake that could not be undone, but a mistake. It didn’t make him love her any less.

 

There had been a number of occasions where he’d skirted the subject of the thing that troubled her, asking indirectly whether there was anything he could help her put to rest. But Leesa would just laugh around whatever drink she was sipping that day and tell him, “Don’t be ridiculous; you’ve done more than enough for me already, Katagiri. Don’t throw away your sanity trying to get mine back or we’ll both be out of luck.”

 

Despite the staunch avoidance of the subject that loomed heaviest in their home, the two of them settled into a sort of comfortable routine after that. With a diagnosis and something to work towards, Billy felt better about leaving Leesa alone all day. She had regular appointments with her therapist and addict group meetings which she would - occasionally - attend, and took up the occasional part-time odd job performing data entry or running basic statistical analyses. It was work that Billy knew was far below her capacity, but busy fingers reached less often for the bottle. Her medication helped with that, too.  

 

Billy’s life also righted itself on its proper course. Graham, alone, had been keeping him busy with requests for custom modifications; the usual — faster, stronger, better, something that could take down a Gundam if one were to appear. Graham in mobile suit form. New developments in GN drive technologies also kept him on his toes, and he found himself worrying less and less about facing the tense atmosphere that awaited him back at his apartment. Soon enough, Leesa’s unannounced arrival at his home was a mark on his calendar six, seven, eight months in the past. It was not incorrect to say that things were good.

 

The first time Leesa Kujo failed to come home was almost a year after she’d shown up. Morbid embarrassment was etched into her face in the bags under her eyes that told of a sleepless night and the chapping of her lips that indicated she’d drank and vomited herself to the point of dehydration as she hugged her arms around herself on Billy’s doorstep.

 

“I’m so sorry,” she’d blurted through the video monitor mounted inside his doorframe to a rather unimpressed looking Billy.

 

Alcohol had been strictly banned from their home. It simply posed too great a temptation, and it was easiest to get rid of it altogether. It had been no cumbersome sacrifice for Billy; he rarely drank, anyway, and he was better off saving the money he would otherwise be spending. Leesa had seemed fully on board with the decision to run a dry household from the get go. She’d acknowledged that it was best that way, that her self control was not her strongest virtue. And, as far as Billy knew, she’d kept that promise.

 

Technically, she hadn’t brought anything into their home.

 

Through a still-locked door, he shot her a stern glare that demanded an explanation, the video feed display losing none of the emotion in its transmission.

 

“Some of the girls went out and I thought I could control myself,” she’d explained, clearly suffering her first hangover in quite some time. “I’m so sorry, Billy. I really messed up.”

 

For a moment that morning, Billy had considered not letting her back inside. He’d stared at the pitiful creature being beamed to him through the video feed, standing in exactly the same spot he’d found her a year ago, and toyed with the idea of leaving her to deal with the consequences. But what good would come of that? Inside his apartment, he could watch over her, make sure she had plenty of water to drink, give her a safe place to sleep it off, feed her and pump her full of aspirin when she was over it. Outside? On the streets? She was most likely to turn to the hair of the dog for relief.

 

He relented.

 

When Leesa said it wouldn’t happen again, Billy took her at her word. But that was the first of many times she made that promise. Just a month after she spent her first night in a bar, it happened again. And again two weeks after that. And then twice the week after that. Coming home to find her passed out behind her sunglasses in that Adirondack chair that he still hadn’t used had become an all-too familiar occurrence for Billy. A routine. She’d stopped going to her meetings weeks ago, and her visits to her therapist only occurred as often as she felt like.

 

Attempting a different strategy, Billy once brought home a case of beer larger than he’d ever known they came in and hefted it onto Leesa’s bed. “You drink here where I can keep an eye on you,” he’d told her with a cold paternal tone to his voice.

 

Billy had never felt himself superior to Leesa in any way. In fact, if asked, he would readily admit that the Leesa Kujo of their grad school days had been obviously superior to him in her intellect and wit and just about every other facet. But now? Now he felt like her caretaker, having to force her into the shower after two days of binging because he couldn’t take the human smells of sweat and vomit and God-knows-what associated with inebriation anymore. That thing tripping all over herself in the alleyway behind the bar in town at some unholy hour was not the master tactician he’d once known. He was terrified that he’d wake up to find out that she’d been tossed into prison to dry out overnight or, worse, had been rushed to the hospital from drinking herself nearly to death. He strictly forbade his thoughts to take it any further than that. Billy believed she was still in there somewhere, but this was not her. It was up to him to protect her now.

 

The new strategy seemed effective. So long as Billy supplied a steady flow of alcohol into his home, Leesa didn’t seek it elsewhere. He knew what he was; the word “enabler” flashed through his thoughts all day. She was an addict. He was essentially her dealer. But what alternative was there? To turn her out? To let her fend for herself - or fail to? It was a non option; she’d be dead in a week. Even as a decent chunk of his paycheck was funneled directly down her throat, he never considered severing his ties and letting her live with her consequences. Even as Graham, the ever-observant Graham with his Virgoic knack for compartmentalizing details to an obsessively meticulous level, noted that Billy had regressed to a constant state of being frazzled again, Billy could do little more than push back the klaxons blaring in his head to alert him to the awful mistakes he was making.

 

“It’s difficult,” he’d told Graham once in confidence. “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of her. But I love her. I don’t know what to do.”

 

“Do what’s best for you,” seemed to Billy to be Graham’s way of saying that he didn’t know, either.

 

What was best for Billy eventually became homeostasis. Leesa was still depressed, still traumatized, still self-medicating with alcohol, but she was alive and they were together. When she was lucid, she was his friend. He still loved her, even if the love had changed into some form he hardly recognized. Leesa was as safe with him as she would have been anywhere else, and Billy was okay just knowing that.

 

…

 

There hadn’t been any warning in the days prior to Setsuna F. Seiei showing up at the apartment Leesa Kujo had shared with Billy Katagiri for the past twenty-and-some months. No new stars had been born. No rips had opened up in the fabric of space. The news showed the same things it had for as long as Leesa could remember: war, destruction, injustice, the anguish of the dispossessed. Beyond the haze of her near constant drunkenness, these things niggled at the back of her mind. She’d had a direct hand in these events. Men and women had died on her watch: Chris, Lichty, Lockon, Allelujah. Emilio. These thoughts tormented her even despite the whiskey and wine, playing and replaying like an old film reel. But it was nothing new, nothing outside the norm.

 

Billy had been doing his best to pull her out of the trench into which she’d fallen, sinking all the way to the bottom in a frozen, lightless ocean. He’d worked for years at returning her to the girl he’d known in university. He’d tried tough love and he’d tried being patient and understanding and he’d tried - she could tell - feeling nothing at all. Leesa wished she could properly voice her appreciation for all he’d done, and express her sorrow for how she’d broken his trust time and time again. How she loved him for it.

 

But the men she loved all eventually died, and so she didn’t dare tell Billy.

 

Instead, she’d decided that she would drink herself into a coma, and then she would be gone. Threat neutralized. No one else would die because of her. Atonement may have been beyond her reach even in sacrificing her own life - for what was the value in giving one waste of a human in exchange for the dozens who had died because of her? - but she could put an end to her part in the slaughtering, and that was all she could do. It was what those who had looked to her for guidance deserved. It wasn’t an ideal plan, perhaps, but she wasn’t an ideal tactician.

 

And then Setsuna was in their living room, and the world was shifting out from underneath Leesa - no, Sumeragi. He’d called her Sumeragi. He’d mentioned Celestial Being. In front of Billy. Billy looked confused, and then— then something else. Shocked. Gutted. Enraged. Empty. Leesa couldn’t quite figure it out, but she wanted to make it go away. She wanted to tell him that this was some elaborate joke, but Billy had been looking for an explanation for some time now, and he seemed to find this one believable. The pieces had just snapped into place.

 

“Now you’ve got nowhere to hide,” Setsuna had told her.

 

She looked between them both for a clue to her next move. She felt hot and cold at the same time, like she would fall through the floorboards at any moment. Billy was looking at her without quite seeing her. Setsuna, alternatively, was seeing into her, through her, piercing her. He was seeing Sumeragi, Celestial Being’s tactician, and not Leesa Kujo, the sad, drunken animal that routinely wore the same clothes for three days and who had lost her wallet so many times at the nearest bar that it had become a sort of running joke for the employees there. His gaze was paving her path to redemption. 

 

Sumeragi reached for Setsuna’s hand. It clamped around her wrist and she was being yanked out of the den where she’d hidden like a wounded fox, licking her wounds for the past two years. Out of the pocket of safety Billy had created for her. Away from the miserable nights spent with her brain flashing up images of her dead comrades until she would crawl out of bed and suppress them with alcohol. Away from Billy himself, whom she loved, whom she would always love, whom she could not voice her love.

 

Toward a second chance, even if she didn’t fully believe it.

 

“I’m sorry,” Sumeragi called to the man still standing frozen in confusion as Setsuna hurried her down the corridor, toward the door to the apartment building. And then she was gone. Billy was gone.

 

But Setsuna was there, leading her to a taxi waiting out front. He nearly threw her in, scooting in beside her and barking out an address to the driver. They were moving.

 

“You shouldn’t have—”

 

“I understand,” Setsuna interrupted.

 

Sumeragi hadn’t gotten the chance before to look at him, to really look, but now that she did, she could find evidence of the passing of four years all over him. Even with both of them sitting, she could tell he’d grown. His face was more the face of a man and he’d lost much of the awkward teenage gangliness that all boys seem to suffer. She thought his voice might have deepened a bit, but he hadn’t said much, so she couldn’t be sure.

 

And his eyes. There was something about his eyes. They were still hard, like he was readying himself for a fight with the entire universe itself at all times, but something other than anger was now behind them, too. Desire. Passion. Humanity. He hadn’t stopped looking at her since he’d extracted her from Billy’s apartment. He was challenging her to engage him.

 

Sumeragi swallowed thickly. “Understand what?”

 

“I understand why you did what you did,” he explained. “Why you hid away. I know you feel guilty for what’s happened to Celestial Being.”

 

Sumeragi laughed humorlessly. “What could you understand about that?”

 

“You forget that I know what it’s like to lose the people in your life who meant everything to you,” he answered. “I know what it’s like to be responsible for their deaths. To have blood on your hands.”

 

Tears were gathering in her eyes now, and it occurred to her that she hadn’t been able to cry about the fate of her team - _her_ boys - in years. She’d made herself numb to it because it was easier. But that wasn’t fair to them.

 

“Please, Setsuna, you should just leave me alone.”

 

“I can’t,” he replied after a moment’s hesitation. He turned his gaze out the window. Out of respect, Sumeragi wondered, or embarrassment? “I can’t because I miss them, too. You’re not the only one who’s spent all this time sick over what happened to your friends. You’re not the only one hurting. I need to make it right, and I need your help.”

 

In four years, Sumeragi noted from her seat in the back of a taxi that was taking her further and further from her misery with every passing second, perhaps the biggest transformation that Setsuna had undergone was his openness. She hardly recognized him as the same boy who was so closed off to the world and ready to leave a trail of dead if it meant accomplishing what he felt he needed.

 

“Alright,” she found herself folding. “Alright, fine. But I don’t know what I can change now.”

 

“Start with yourself.”

 

“It’s not that easy,” she countered. A shiver tore through her body. What would Billy be doing right about now? Would he cry? Would he burn her things? Would he curse her name? Why had it been so hard to open up to him? She’d had so many opportunities. He’d expertly crafted inumerable chances for her to come clean, no judgment, no consequences.

 

But how would Billy have been able to anticipate the magnitude of the horror of her truth? The look on his face when Setsuna had released all of the secrets like floodwaters through a broken dam had been her proof that she’d made the right choice.

 

And even still, there had been plenty of things she should have been able to express to him that didn’t involve her past employment as lead tactical forecaster for the most infamous terrorist organization of their time. Why had it been so shameful to admit that every day she woke up, she couldn’t wait for it to end? That sleeping had been her only refuge from the ghosts in her past because sleeping was as close as she could get to not existing? That everything hurt all the time because she was filled with so much grief that her mind could no longer contain it on its own and had been forced to share with her body? Maybe she would have even felt some relief if she’d ever told Billy all of these things, but Billy was a good man, and he didn’t deserve to be wrapped up in all of the fallout that would inevitably come along with knowing her dirty details.

 

“I know it’s not.” Setsuna was calm, watching the passing trees and buildings beyond the window. Lifting his eyes to look at the clouds gathering above them. Then fixing them on her once again. “I’ll help you.”

 

Sumeragi thought for a moment. Leesa Kujo would have turned down his offer. Leesa Kujo would have denied knowing this young man, of ever having been involved with a terrorist organization. Leesa Kujo would have been fine to spend the rest of her days wallowing in the misery she’d created for herself when she’d cost the lives of the people she’d loved. But, perhaps, Sumeragi Lee Noriega was stronger than Leesa Kujo. And if that was the case then it was because Sumeragi had Setsuna and the rest of Celestial Being behind her. Supporting her. Pushing her.

 

“I don’t know if I can be helped,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “I don’t know if I want to be helped.”

 

“I know,” Setsuna replied. “But you will.”

 

* * *

  

_//share with others, understand each other, so that we may learn to love//_

**Author's Note:**

> A character study of Billy and Sumeragi, and some self-indulgence in one of my favorite G00 topics: the time skip between s1 and s2. Sumeragi thanks Billy for the past two years at the beginning of the second season, and it makes me wonder what those years were like. 
> 
> Artistic liberties in this one include deciding that the MSWAD base would have been in the U.S. Midwest somewhere (like the Wright Patterson AFB or something; they need space for all those mechs, and I like the thought of Graham saying “pop” instead of “soda”.) I also made the housing a bit more realistic than the glimpses we’re shown of big, sleek, Tokyo-esque skyscrapers. I know this series is 300 years in the future, but considering there are so many homes in the Midwest dating back to the 19th century... Yeah.


End file.
